Friends,
The geography-challenged papercrats running the Riverside County court system thought it’d be neat for me sit in a jury room in the city of Riverside today. I’ve never been to the court there and those who’ve been staring at words I’ve posted here for a while would presume that this thought made me a nervous wreck. What you may not know is that I’ve been issued a Motorola Droid at work. A lot of phones have mapping applications, of course, but this one has free built-in turn-by-turn maps missing from others (ahem! iPhone!). Neat, I thought, constantly updating maps that I’ll need to refer to instead of the degraded freeways along the way. What could go wrong? Then I tapped the Navigation icon. Hello! What’s this? Mrs. Droid is now telling me where to go (you do seem to have that effect. – ed).
Not just which turns to take at the last minute, but advance warning as well. I would’ve liked some repeats and hoped that some voice input might’ve been rolled in as well, but I couldn’t get a response from “what?” “huh?” “say again?” or even “repeat.” I’m sure someone will comment that I’m missing something, but I’d love to know how to make it work better.
By the way, the judge dismissed me from a trial this morning after my halting, sputtering plea that I can’t afford to lose that much pay. The woman dismissed before me had her service rescheduled after explaining that she’d have to care for her husband after eye surgery. Eye surgery, people. I think I will never understand their system.
– bob